"Dissipation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affected; and use consists in a faithful, sincere, and diligent discharge of the duties of our calling. The love of use, and a consequent application to it, preserve the powers of the mind, and prevent their dispersion; so that the mind is guarded against wandering and dissipation, and the imbibing of false lusts, which with their enchanting delusions flow in from the body and the world through the senses, whereby the truths of religion and morality, with all that is good in either, become the sport of every wind; but the ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... source of trouble to me, and a burden. Too close occupation with my needle had its effects upon my health, and feeling exhausted with work, I determined to make a change. I had a conversation with Mr. Keckley; informed him that since he persisted in dissipation we must separate; that I was going North, and that I should never live with him again, at least until I had good evidence of his reform. He was rapidly debasing himself, and although I was willing to work for him, I was not willing to ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... think and to live for herself, without regard to unmeaning wonder or selfish remonstrances; she had neither ambition for splendour, nor spirits for dissipation; the recent sorrow of her heart had deadened it for the present to all personal taste of happiness, and her only chance for regaining it, seemed through the medium of bestowing it upon others. She had seen, too, by Mr Harrel, how wretchedly external brilliancy ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... very comfortless way of life, but I have no doubt it is the preferred result of a long experience of the world, and that the parties, upon the whole, find it superior, according to their early formed habits of dissipation and gaiety, to the sedate but not more regular course ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... be surprised to hear that for one American who knows "Star Spangled Banner," one hundred and fifty know "God Save the Queen," upon which we cheered him, and stood up and all lustily sang "God Save the Queen;" after this dissipation we added that of an oyster supper and toddy! thanks to Mr. Burns. Here is ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... began to distinguish in the squalor of the faces that surrounded him the separate causes of their malady—to know drink from disease, dissipation from destitution, the drug-habit from hunger. Complexion and facial expression stood more than dress as an indication of trade, habit, and environment; from physiognomy he began to learn history, and from Monday's streets a commentary ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... our society rests upon production and conservation. For individuals or for governments to waste and squander their resources is to deny these rights and disregard these obligations. The result of economic dissipation to a nation ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... sparingly, and for actual events, newspapers have a value which is all their own; but to spend hours upon them, as many do, is mere mental dissipation. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and gaslight, and glitter, and crowds of human beings once more. Our rooms are taken at Langham's, Edie, and that blessed darling, Captain Hammond, goes with us. Lady Portia, Lady Gwendoline, and Lady Laura are coming also, and I mean to plunge headlong into the giddy whirl of dissipation, and mingle with the bloated aristocracy. Why don't you laugh? What are you looking so ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... work. The reason of this was as easily seen, immediately the fact was revealed. As Watt himself expressed it, the causes of this loss, causes which would obviously be exaggerated in a small engine, were: "First, the dissipation of heat by the cylinder itself, which was of brass and both a good conductor and a good radiator. Secondly, the loss of heat consequent upon the necessity of cooling down the cylinder at every stroke in producing the vacuum. Thirdly, the loss of power due to the pressure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... wisely used it is one of the most real blessings of life. It is of course only within the reach of a small minority, but the number might easily be much larger than it is. Often when it is inherited in early youth it is scattered in one or two years of gambling and dissipation, followed by a lifetime of regret. In other cases it crumbles away in a generation, for it is made an excuse for a life of idleness, and when children multiply or misfortunes arrive, what was once a competence becomes nothing ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of this affection, they enjoy what they call their independence, either by devoting themselves to Cupid or to Plutus, and more frequently to both together. As it is not very difficult to make the acquaintance of these priestesses of pleasure and dissipation, I soon got ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... estimate of the human mind. The fact was that Van Stingey was a false, low, cruel man, whose soul, steeped in the sensuality of his past life, had lost all that was divine in its nature. His circumstances were so reduced by his crimes and dissipation, that, being "too lazy to work, and ashamed to beg," he assumed first the guise of religion to gain popularity; and when he had "got religion," then the teachers of the stuff which they call by that noble name, to keep it respectable, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... to created things, to thine own flesh, to vanities and dissipation; but Grace draweth to God and to virtues, renounceth creatures, fleeth from the world, hateth the desires of the flesh, restraineth vagaries, blusheth to be ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... sufficiently general, partaking equally of the Doric of New England, the Dutch cross, and the old English root; whereas, Mr. Dodge spoke the pure, unalloyed Tuscan of his province, rigidly adhering to all its sounds and significations. "Dissipation," he contended, meant "drunkenness;" "ugly," "vicious;" "clever," "good-natured;" and "humbly," (homely) "ugly." In addition to this finesse in significations, he had a variety of pronunciations that often put strangers at fault, and to which he adhered ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... would be a considerable loss of energy through conduction of heat by the gases. In the vacuum lamp nearly all the electrical energy is converted into radiant energy, which is emitted by the filament and any dissipation of heat is an energy loss. A high vacuum was one of the chief aims up to this time, but a ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent and masculine. Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... his appointment Bonaparte repaired to Valence, where his regiment was stationed and where he formed a strong attachment for the young daughter of Madame du Colombier, with whom, history records, he ate cherries before breakfast. This was his sole dissipation at that time, but his felicity was soon to be interrupted. His regiment was ordered to Lyons, and Bonaparte and his love ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... great dissipation, its hotels, its cafes and restaurants, its cosmopolitan life and movement, its gaiety and the picturesqueness of its old streets and wharves. Marseilles is a neglected tourist point; it should be better known; ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible (and how much also that human mind must forever remain incapable ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... the want of money; looking on study and fame as too slow a means of arriving at the pleasures that tempted me; drawn one way by my inward scruples, and another by evil examples; meeting with every facility for low dissipation, and finding nothing but hindrances barring the way to good society, I passed my days in wretchedness, overwhelmed by a surging tumult of desires, and by indolence of the most deadly kind, utterly cast down at times, only to be as ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... he was," said the general, drily. "He had plenty of dash and go, but no moral courage. He came home after the wars were over, and broke his mother's heart by becoming a drunkard and a gambler; and he died an early death from drink and dissipation." ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... recollect that it was with glee Sir R. Peel said to me on Monday, 'I am glad to say you will meet the duke here,' which had reference, I doubt not, partly to the anticipated pleasure of seeing him, partly to the dissipation of unworthy suspicions. He reported that government are still labouring at a church measure without appropriation. Jan. 20.—The Duke of Wellington appears to speak little; and never for speaking's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of the mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much was fanciful, how much was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in an attitude of great affection and devotion. Sensually, the woman had marked characteristics, and, with the flattery that surrounded her, she soon became a favourite in the select circles which made such places as "The Poodle Dog" and "Zinkand's" famous. In general dissipation, she was always careful not in any way to indulge in excesses which would jeopardize her physical attractiveness, or for one moment to diminish her sense of keen ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... incident is that our deepest need is forgiveness. No doubt, something in the paralytic's case determined Christ's method with him. Perhaps his sickness had been brought on by dissipation, and possibly conscience was lashing him with a whip of scorpions, so that, while his friends sought for his healing, he himself was more anxious for pardon. It is very unlikely that Jesus would have offered forgiveness unless He had known that it was yearned ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but because he wants to go somewhere else. He is always on the road travelling, travelling, travelling. It is not hope of gain that takes him, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there. It is not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hard enough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away. He looks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commits his depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling that ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... his newspaper friends and plunged into a round of dissipation. Beneath the grim tragedy of blood in Washington flowed the ever widening and deepening torrent of sensual revelry—of wine and women, song ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... purest fire. Under one arm he bore his gold-edged hat, and as he strolled forward, peering coolly about him through his quizzing glass, I thought I had never seen such graceful assurance, nor such insolently handsome eyes, marred by the faint shadows of dissipation. ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the poor washerwoman, had seen better days; but the drunken dissipation of a husband, who was now in his grave, had reduced her to abject, despairing poverty. Her unfortunate marriage and persistence in clinging to the man of her choice, and enduring all his abuses, excited the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... has given the world a delightful glimpse of what the life at Windsor and Buckingham Palace was from 1842 to 1845; how much real friendliness existed in it; what simplicity and naturalness lay behind its pomp and magnificence. Dissipation and extravagance found no place there. That palace home—whether in town or country, where all sacred obligations and sweet domestic affections reigned supreme, where noble work had due prominence and high-minded study paved the way for innocent ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... Jose Arguello, for the second time, in New Orleans," she said slowly, "eight years ago. He was still rich, but ruined in health by dissipation. I was tired of my way of life. He proposed that I should marry him to take care of him and legitimatize our child. I was forced to tell him what I had done with her, and that the Trust could not be disturbed until she was of age and her own mistress. He assented. ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... been accustomed from his youth to dissipation and applause. Caligula was pleased with his skill in driving a chariot; Claudius loved him because he was a great gamester; and he gained the favour of Nero by wishing him to sing publicly in the theatre. Upon his arrival ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... however, to drown our pains and sorrows not in selfish work and pleasures, but in Christian work and in the joys of Christian service. Let us use no intoxicating cup to cover with oblivion our troubles and cares. Some plunge even into actual dissipation that they may kill the sting of memory. Others resort to business and social pleasures. But then the forgetfulness is short-lived and bitter, and you truly add new causes for further regret in years to come. It is worth our while to forget our trials and sorrows, if we do so by becoming absorbed ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... Yes, it is in retirement that our affections are raised to God, and our souls refreshed and quickened by the influences of the Holy Spirit. If we would live near the threshold of Heaven, and daily take a glance at our promised inheritance we must avoid not only worldly, but religious dissipation. Strange as it may seem, I do believe there is something like religious dissipation, in a Christian's being so entirely engrossed in religious company, as ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... of the wealth that is at present bestowed upon mere articles of luxury, or in scenes of riot and dissipation, would more than effect this great purpose. The education of the poorer classes must add greatly to the well-being and happiness of the world, and tend to diminish the awful amount of crimes and misery, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... these monks had fallen away from their original state of sanctity. They preserved a name for piety among the country folk by their austere demeanour, but in secret, within the walls of their own monastery, they practised every sort of dissipation and crime. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the lie to these heavy doubts against him? On the contrary. Though Sweetwater knew little of the dark record which had made this young man the disgrace of his family, what he did know was so much against him that he could well see that the distance usually existing between simple dissipation and desperate crime might be easily bridged by some great necessity for money. Had there been such a necessity? Sweetwater found it easy to believe so. And Frederick's manner? Was it that of an honest man simply shocked by the suspicions which had fallen upon the woman he loved? Had ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... hereditary predisposition, narrow or contracted chest, deformed spine, delicacy of constitution, bad and scanty diet, or food containing but little nourishment, impure air, close in-door confinement in schools, in shops, and in factories, ill-ventilated apartments, dissipation, late hours, over-taxing with book-learning the growing brain, thus producing debility, want of proper out-door exercises and amusements, tight lacing; indeed, anything and everything, that either will debilitate ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... a good deal more about himself—how he had been knocking around in all sorts of questionable places and how the dissipation had grown very distasteful to him. It had certainly ruined his health, and his eyes had a hollow, feverish look in them that ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... seemed to be a friend of the family. One was a spendthrift named Rentworth—a young traveller of that loose, easy-going type which is occasionally met with in foreign parts, squandering the money of a rich father. He was a decidedly handsome young fellow, but with the stamp of dissipation already on his countenance. The other was a telegraph engineer, with honesty and good-nature in every line ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Earl of Strafford, Nov. 27.-Surrender of the British forces at York Town. Gloomy forebodings of the consequences. General spirit of dissipation—296 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... quite sure where she stood in society, you see, and wouldn't for the world have her pride lessened; so she discarded poor Tom. And the girl has been got out of the way, and Tom has become penniless, and such a wreck of dissipation that no respectable house will admit him. It's a stiff old family, that Swiggs family! His mother keeps him threading in and out of jail, just to be rid of him. She is a curious mother; but when I think how he looks and acts, how can I wonder she keeps him in jail? I had to put him there twice—I ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... restless and dissatisfied; and instead of laughing, as formerly, at public employment as only vanity and vexation, he, now that a greater vexation assailed him in his once peaceful home, eagerly sought relief, not, as a younger or less virtuous man might have done, in dissipation, but in the distractions of public business. But here again his evil fortune granted the desired boon in a shape pregnant with future disaster. The hostility of Mrs. Wilde's family, which had now become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... the difficulty was ended only by the death of the former. The other two brothers lived in harmony for some time, because the Persian war in the East occupied Constantius, while Constans was satisfied with a life of indolence and dissipation. Constans was murdered in 350, and his brother was sole Emperor. He died ten years later, and was succeeded ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... influence on the court was equally good. She discouraged levities, gossip, and dissipation. If the palace was not so gay as during the reign of Madame de Montespan, it was more decorous and more intellectual. It became fashionable to go to church, and to praise good sermons and read books of casuistry. "Tartuffe grew pale before Escobar." Bossuet and Bourdaloue were equal oracles ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... most important for the business man or employe to consider. The young man who spends his time in gambling, drinking or dissipation cannot do his best work. He can no more hide these practices than the clouds can obscure the sun permanently, for evil, as well as truth, is sure ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... to still the memory of her sorrows. It is touching to see how, now that she could no longer doubt that Imlay was made of common clay, she began to find excuses for him. She represented to herself that it was her misfortune to have met him too late. Had she known him before dissipation had enslaved him, there would have been none of this trouble. She was, furthermore, convinced that his natural refinement was not entirely destroyed, and that if he would but make the effort he could overcome his grosser appetites. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... to do with the common relationships of life, she felt no shock of offended sentiment. But in a short space of time, as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds. This grieved her because of the sacred memory of her husband's efforts for these people, and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous personal desire that they should ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Greek?"—Literary Convention, p. 209. "For where does beauty and high wit But in your constellation meet?"—Hudibras, p. 134. "Thence to the land where flows Ganges and Indus."—Paradise Lost, B. ix, l. 81. "On these foundations seems to rest the midnight riot and dissipation of modern assemblies."—Brown's Estimate, ii, 46. "But what has disease, deformity, and filth, upon which the thoughts can be allured to dwell?"—Johnson's Life of Swift, p. 492. "How is the gender and number of the relative known?"—Bullions, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... society. For what he gazed upon was not the lovely Pinky of other days, but a very fat, untidy, ugly black woman in a calico Mother Hubbard dress. The face, while good-natured, was wrinkled with age and dissipation; indeed, worldling that he was, Mr. Gibney saw at a glance that Pinky had grown fond of her gin. From the royal lips a huge black ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... overthrown Mithridates, was about to set out on his return with his victorious legions. He would surely exact speedy and terrible vengeance. Marius, old and enfeebled by the hardships of many campaigns, seemed to shrink from again facing his hated rival. He plunged into dissipation to drown his remorse and gloomy forebodings, and died in his ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something; and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... understood—especially by the Blade's friends—spends his time in a whirl of dissipation. That is the symbolism of the emphatic obliquity of the costume. First, he drinks. The Blade at Harrow, according to a reliable authority, drinks cherry brandy and even champagne; other Blades consume ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... stragglers passed down the street near by, and a few starved peasants crept about the cathedral with downcast eyes, eager for crumbs that a well-fed soldier might cast aside. Yet I knew that in the Intendant's Palace and among the officers of the army there was abundance, with revelry and dissipation. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not yet built up a strong, vigorous, and aggressive party in the North. The lack of proper social opportunities, and this deterioration among men in public life, led to an increasing violence and roughness in debate, and to a good deal of coarse dissipation in private. There was undoubtedly a brighter side, but it was limited, and the surroundings of the distinguished men who led our political parties in 1841 at the national capital, do not present a very ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... the past to have been largely injurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that most novels work is by no ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... do not so exactly conform to the precepts of Pythagoras, as to practise every night this solemn recollection, yet I am not so lost in dissipation as wholly to omit it; nor can I forbear sometimes to inquire of myself, in what employment my life has passed away. Much of my time has sunk into nothing, and left no trace by which it can be distinguished; and of this I now only know, that it was once in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... made his appearance, in 1833, on the boulevard des Italiens, at Frascati, and at the Jockey-Club, he was leading the life of a young man who, having lost his political prospects, was taking his pleasure in Parisian dissipation. At first he was ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... begun to tremble when I think of the destiny of women, and to understand why so many wear a sad face beneath the flush brought by the unnatural excitement of social dissipation. Marriage is a mere matter of chance. Look at yours. A storm of wild thoughts has passed over my mind. To be loved every day the same, yet with a difference, to be loved as much after ten years of happiness as on the first day!—such a love demands years. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... and sniffed curiously at the prostrate man; a vagabond dog, with that deep sympathy which the species have for drunken men, had licked his dusty boots and curled himself up at his feet, and lay there, blinking one eye in the sunlight, with a simulation of dissipation that was ingenious and dog-like in its implied flattery of ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... other way, for you see the fellow on the shutter was dirty, not "dressed" at all, though it was Sunday, poor folks' ball-day; a dirty, rough fellow, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, a chalky-white face—apparently from low dissipation—a disreputable rascal, a monstrously impudent "chap," a true London mongrel. He "cheeked" her; she tossed her head, and looked the other way. But by-and-by she could not help a sly glance at him, not an angry glance—a look as much as to say, "You're a man, anyway, and you've ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... brief struggle Lucien yields to temptation, and joins in the struggle for wealth and power. But he has not strength enough to play his part. His head is turned by the flattery of pretty actresses and scheming publishers: he is enticed into thoughtless dissipation, and, after a brilliant start, finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him; that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to escape ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... worthy to wear them, he owed to the resources and energies of his own mind. In a few months, however, the delusion vanished. Charles had borne the blossoms of promise; they were blasted under the withering influence of pleasure and dissipation. ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture, are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the opening ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... pocketed the notes with great satisfaction, and began to express her admiration for such honorable conduct in a very voluble manner. Lettice cut her short and got rid of her, and then, if the truth must be confessed, she sat down and had a comfortable cry over the speedy dissipation of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of this venture was the beginning of Clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss, and the success of Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas where his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... left perfectly destitute through the spendthrift habits of my father. I was easily persuaded to go on the stage, and soon tempted, with my youth and inexperience, to lead an irregular life. I do not wish to assert that dissipation necessarily follows the choice of the actress's profession, for I have known many estimable women on the stage. I, unhappily, was not one of the number. I confess it to my shame, and, as the chief of sinners, I am ...
— A Fair Penitent • Wilkie Collins
... Negroes.—These are found in considerable numbers in different parts of the Province. In some parts a number of families are settled together as farmers; but they do not make good settlers, being of a volatile disposition, much addicted to dissipation; they are impatient of labour, and in general fitter for performing menial offices about houses as domestics, than the more important, but laborious duties of farmers.—In their persons, the inhabitants of New-Brunswick are well made, tall and athletic. There are ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... handsome at one time, but it was now marred and brutalized by a life of dissipation. His nose and cheeks were purple, his eyes bloodshot, and a matted growth of brown hair strayed from beneath ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... for the millions entrusted to them, but returned those millions in the sacks they were delivered in, tied with the same twine; men who fulfilled their trusts to the letter, drew honest inventories, took fatherly interest in their clients, often barring the way to extravagance and dissipation,—men to whom families confided their secrets, and who felt so responsible for any error in their deeds that they meditated long and carefully over them. Never during his whole notarial life, had any client ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... copyist of his manner, he exerted a very pernicious influence on his friend's conduct. He borrowed inspiration from Churchill, and gave him infamy in exchange. The poet could do nothing by halves. Along with Lloyd, he rushed into a wild career of dissipation. He became a nightly frequenter of the theatres, taverns, and worse haunts. His wife, with whom, after the first year, he never seems to have been happy, instead of checking, outran her husband in extravagance and imprudence. ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed; when the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice. Fix on which ever it may, it will stick by you; for you know it has been said, and truly, 'The way the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' This, in a strong point of view, shows the propriety of letting your inexperience be directed by maturer advice, and ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... people will soon reject that which is presented to them under the aspect of study and labor. Learning their knowledge and science in sport, they will be too apt to make sport of both; while the habit of intellectual dissipation, thus engendered, cannot fail, in course of time, to produce a thoroughly emasculating effect both upon their mind and character. "Multifarious reading," said Robertson, of Brighton, "weakens the mind like smoking, and is an excuse for its lying dormant. It is the idlest of all idlenesses, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... household furniture, attached to nothing, content with nothing, and looking with anxiety to the next change of fashion which shall introduce something new into the house, can take no sort of comfort, let their circumstances be ever so affluent. It is a kind of dissipation in which some otherwise worthy people are prone to indulge, but altogether pernicious in the indulgence. It detracts, also, from the apparent respectability of a family to find nothing old about them—as if they themselves were of yesterday, and newly dusted out of a modern shop-keeper's ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and controul of his parents and relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts of his education might have had some tendency ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... cooked hard the paper was burned to ashes, but the egg came off clean and nice from the stove, and made as palatable and indigestible an article for a late supper as one could wish. It only wanted the addition of Mandluff's peculiar whisky to make it dissipation of the choicest kind. For the more a dissipation costs in life and health, the more ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... is the faithful city become an harlot!" Jeremiah said (Lam. i. 1), "How doth the city sit solitary!" Rabbi Levi saith, "The thing is like to a matron who has three friends; one saw her in her prosperity, another saw her in her dissipation, and the third saw her in her pollution. So Moses saw Israel in their glory and prosperity, and he said, 'How can I myself bear your cumbrance!' Isaiah saw them in their dissipation, and he said, 'How is the faithful city,' etc.; and ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On one side of the women were the shameless houses out of which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down to the boarding-house scale through various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor and despair. Down nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... been protesting to beat the band about the lawlessness and dissipation of the MacMorrogh camps. Accordingly, Mr. Colbrith comes over here to see for himself: and what will he see? Decency on a monument smiling reproachfully at her unprincipled traducer. MacMorrogh will rub it into you good and hard. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... am told He had another execution in his house yesterday—in short his Dissipation and extravagance exceed anything ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... give a few illustrations of this resultless restlessness, this dissipation of the youthful forces, to which I have alluded; but there is one phase of my experience here which goes further to prove its prevalence and baneful effects than a thousand instances derived from my knowledge of boys in school ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... public ball by subscription every night at one of the houses, to which all the company from the others are admitted by tickets; and, indeed, Harrigate treads upon the heels of Bath, in the articles of gaiety and dissipation — with this difference, however, that here we are more sociable and familiar. One of the inns is already full up to the very garrets, having no less than fifty lodgers, and as many servants. Our family does not exceed thirty-six; and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Grand Prior discreetly removed his joint-stool out of hearing of the two cousins, and called the little maid to rehearse to him the Credo and Ave, with their English equivalents—a task that pretty Bessee highly disapproved after the fortnight's dissipation, and would hardly have performed for one less beloved of children ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... less than three alight—or lolled at full length upon the damask sofas. These persons were not, upon the whole, of an aristocratic type; many of them, indeed, were of good birth, and all had taken the usual pains with their costume, but a life of dissipation had set its vulgarizing mark on them: on the seniors the pallid and exhausted look of the roue was indeed rarely seen—country air and rough exercise had forbidden that—but drink and hard living had written their autographs upon them in another and worse handwriting. Blotches and pimples ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the South African that tea does to the Englishman, save that it is consumed in much larger quantities. I might add that Smuts neither drinks liquor of any kind nor smokes, and he eats sparingly. He admits that his one dissipation is farming. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... things not in the manuscript which were sources of interest and delight. There was Mr. Tapping, the stage director, for instance; Thyrsis could see himself writing another play, just to get Mr. Tapping in. He was a man well on in years, and wrecked by dissipation—almost bald and toothless, and with one foot crippled with gout. Yet he was a perfect geyser of activity— bounding about the stage, talking swiftly, gesticulating—like some strange gnome or cobold out of the bowels of the earth. Thyrsis ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... of you will be warped. It is so very strange in my mother, generally the kindest, most open-hearted woman in the world, to distrust and bear a grudge against them all for the son's dissipation—just as if that affected the ladies of ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Congress. But similar cases arising after the Civil War were disposed of by direct recourse to the commerce clause.[616] Meantime, in 1865, the newly admitted State of Nevada, in an endeavor to prevent a threatened dissipation of its population, levied a special tax on railroad and stage companies for every passenger they carried out of the State, and in Crandall v. Nevada[617] this act was held void on the general ground that the National Government had at all times the right to require the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... given to the dissipation in which May was dipping. The longing in which she had indulged, ever since she had first heard of its possible fulfilment, was granted—a Greek play was to be acted by the young women who stood for the "Grecians" of the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... his skill and courage by the victorious Commander-in-chief. Every body knows the history of the battle of New Orleans—I need not relate it. After the victory, the soldiers were allowed considerable license, and they made New Orleans a scene of revel and dissipation, as all cities are likely to represent when near a victorious army. Peter Houp was on a "regular bender," a "big tare," a long spree—and for one so unlike any thing of the kind, he went ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... he was at the very time the house was entered, had people ready to depose that he was on his way by water to his farm near Parramatta. This man had formerly been remarkable for propriety of conduct; but, after he became a settler, gave himself up to idleness and dissipation, and went away from the court in which he had been giving his testimony, much degraded in the opinion of every ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... Wealth of Nations, that where a fortune is not realized in a family, sufficient to enable it to withdraw entirely from trade, it seldom remains wealthy above two generations. The sons most frequently want intelligence or industry to augment what their father got, and the grandsons have generally dissipation enough to squander entirely away what remains. This is so frequent a case in London, that it may be called the regular routine of the business; and, what arises by regular routine, must be derived from ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Such a month of dissipation! You must know that at my time of life I run down a bit every spring, and our family physician prescribed a course of scale exercises on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, and after that—New York, for Lenten recreation! Now, New York is not quiet, nor is it ever Lenten. A crowded town, huddled on an ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of a very different nature—the dressing their hair and adorning their persons. Tommy himself had now completely resumed his natural character, and thrown aside all that he had learned during his residence with Mr Barlow; he had contracted an infinite fondness for all those scenes of dissipation which his new friends daily described to him, and began to be convinced that one of the most important things in life is a fashionable dress. In this most rational sentiment he had been confirmed by almost ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... themselves up to the aberrations of their minds and senses, and for two or three years' folly spoil their lives beyond repair. If he had had time to yield to his thoughts he would have fallen into discouragement or perhaps taken to dissipation: always when he turned in upon himself he became a prey to his morbid dreams, and disgust with life, and Paris, and the impure fermentation of all those millions of human beings mingling and rotting together. But the sight ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... life, deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of people.... Very few of them can be called fallen women; scarcely any of them are the victims of seduction, according to the ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... I grew indignant that he should bring all this misery upon me—the poverty and disgrace that I felt sure must follow such a course. Then in a moment of tenderness I would plead and expostulate with him, begging him with tears to leave his habits of dissipation for my sake, for his own sake, for the sake of my dead mother; while he would talk and weep, telling me that he could not break away; there was something continually drawing him to the gaming-house—he knew it was ruining him, but he must go, while ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... the ancients place the Naiad and her fountain in the shady arbor of trees, whose foliage gathers the waters of heaven into her fount and preserves them from dissipation. From their dripping shades she distributes the waters, which she has garnered from the skies, over the plain and the valley: and the husbandman, before he has learned the marvels of science, worships the beneficent Naiad, who draws the waters ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the dissipation of a dream too much above mortal frailty, too much above the contingencies of chance and change, to be permanently realised. But the damsels had consented, and the suitors rejoiced; and if ever there ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... this innocent dissipation I began to feel the desire for a better life, and turned, by my father's advice, to Sir Walter Scott. 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Pirate' pleased me immensely; 'Waverley' and 'The Heart of Midlothian' I accepted with qualifications; but the two of Scott's novels that gave me the most pleasure, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... friends' friends, men of Beni-Mora, men from the near oasis, and also many of those desert wanderers who drift in daily out of the sands to the centres of buying and selling, barter their goods for the goods of the South, or sell their loads of dates for money, and, having enjoyed the dissipation of the cafes and of the dancing-houses, drift away again into the pathless wastes which are ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... that, about two o'clock, every day, the windows and doors of the town are all closed, the streets are deserted, and the stillness of midnight reigns throughout. At four they rise, wash and dress, and prepare for the dissipation of the evening. About eleven o'clock refreshments are offered; but few take any thing except a little wine ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... village dissipation Evan loitered around home playing catch with Henty and Lou. He found they liked to have the ball tossed midway between them, and did his ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... What were his books and fine pretensions worth if they could not protect him in such ordinary danger? Thus it came to pass that after a fall, when he went back to his work, it was so unreal to him, such a mockery, that days often elapsed before he could do anything. It was a mere toy, a dilettante dissipation, the embroidery of corruption. Oh, for a lawgiver, for a time of restraint, for the time of Regulus and the republic! Then, said Charmides to himself, my work would have some value, for heroic obedience would he behind ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... book. Can words express my exquisite sense of duty done, when I had slipped out of the house, unsuspected by any of them, and when I found myself in the street with my empty bag under my arm? Oh, my worldly friends, pursuing the phantom, Pleasure, through the guilty mazes of Dissipation, how easy it is to be happy, if you will only ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... who stayed there once for a fortnight, told us a good deal about the place, and strongly recommended us not to go there unless we had plenty of time to spare, as we should not be repaid for our trouble, which would probably only result in the dissipation of ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... returned to the study. There were, perhaps, twenty poems she had thought worth preserving, and her eye traveled over page after page as she weighed the merits and defects of each before making her choice. A sensitive ear had given her admirable imitative powers in versification, and her father, before dissipation had dulled his intellect, had been a man of rare cultivation and literary taste. Deena, among all his children, was the only one whose education he had personally superintended, and she brought to her passion ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... and with Germans perhaps more than any other people Christmas is a season of elaborate festivity. On this their first Christmas away from home many of the Germans would be likely to be off their guard either through homesickness or dissipation. They cared nothing for either side. There had been much plundering in New Jersey and discipline ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... remarked, Rainscourt found no difficulty in making friends of all sorts, and of both sexes—and he had launched into a routine of gaiety and dissipation, in which he continued for several months, without allowing his wife and daughter to interrupt his amusements, or to enter his thoughts. He had enclosed an order upon the banker at —- soon after his arrival in London, and he considered that he had ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... consumption! Every practicing doctor has seen this, not once, but hundreds of times, and in the vast majority of instances he can say with truth that the frightful result is a consequence of overwork—too often associated with nocturnal dissipation. The man who works during the day, and devotes his nights to alcohol and gay company when he should be sleeping, will assuredly, sooner or later—and usually sooner—suffer the ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... foreign policy was flighty to the verge of foolishness. She contemplated an alliance with Spain, a state quite outside the orbit of Sweden's influence, the firstfruits of which were to have been an invasion of Portugal. She utterly neglected affairs in order to plunge into a whirl of dissipation with her foreign favourites. The situation became impossible, and it was with an intense feeling of relief that the Swedes saw her depart, in masculine attire, under the name of Count Dohna. At Innsbruck she openly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... of California is especially kind to childhood and old age. Men live longer there, and, if unwasted by dissipation, strength of body is better conserved. To children the conditions of life are particularly favorable. California could have no better advertisement at some world's fair than a visible demonstration of this fact. A series of measurements of the children of Oakland has recently been taken, ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... society engender in his heart. In those nations who appear the most thoroughly convinced of this future punishment, may be seen assassins, thieves, crafty knaves, oppressors, adulterers, voluptuaries; all these pretend they are firmly persuaded of the reality of an hereafter; yet in the whirlwind of dissipation, in the vortex of pleasure, in the fury of their passions, they no longer behold this formidable future existence, which in those moments has no kind of influence over their ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... learned from Ben Gibson, was employed somewhere on the street. Rufus might, in spite of the manner in which he had treated him, prove a truer friend in need than the worthless companions of his hours of dissipation. ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... exceeding candor of his mentor to disturb their friendship. The pioneer was not wholly without defence to the impeachment. He might have pleaded ill health, of which he had had quantum suf. since 1836 for himself and family. He might have pleaded also the dissipation of too much of his energies in consequence of more or less pecuniary embarrassments from which he was never wholly freed; but, above all, he might have pleaded his increasing activity as an anti-slavery lecturer. His contributions to the movement against slavery ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the "club's" favorite game, "is too deliberately excitin' for me. To watch Beriah Higgins and Ezra Weeks fightin' out a game of checkers is like gettin' your feet froze in January and waitin' for spring to come and thaw 'em out. It's a numbin' kind of dissipation." ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... seen what opinions will be excited by his arrival; especially, too, as I shall be necessarily absent five or six weeks from it, on business in several places. Thirdly, considering how important it is to avoid idleness and dissipation, to improve his mind, and to give him all the advantages which education can bestow, my opinion and my advice to him are, if he is qualified for admission, that he should enter as a student in the university in Cambridge, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... nowt; Or down Italian vista startles, Wh—re-hunting amang groves o' myrtles Then bouses drumly German water, To mak' himsel' look fair and fatter, An' clear the consequential sorrows, Love-gifts of carnival signoras. For Britain's guid!—for her destruction Wi' dissipation, feud, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Breckenridge raised sodden and redshot eyes to his wife's face, moistening his dark and swollen lips carefully with his tongue before he spoke. He was a fat-faced man, who, despite evidences of dissipation, did not look his more than forty years. There was no gray in his thin, silky hair, and there still lingered an air of youth and innocence in his round face. This morning he was in a bad temper because his whole body was still upset from the Friday night dinner and drinking party, and in ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... though they used the railway, of course, they did so only for a few hours a day, and got out and remained at places of interest. Richard was very amenable, and indeed showed no desire for dissipation; his one weakness—that of having a "spree"—had no opportunity of being gratified; and Maitland wrote home the most gratifying letters, not only respecting the behaviour of his charge, but of the improvement in his health. As they drew nearer to Italy, Richard observed one day ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... always admired you and loved you, always heard you calling me, as if from some sacred corner of a perfect world. Is it that yesterday's dissipation—yes, I was drunk yesternight, drunk in a new way. I was drunk with the thought of you, the longing for you. I picked a big handful of roses, and in my mind gave them into your hands. And I thought you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
